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> "Are all the work facilities like this? Enclosed, built in?"> "To some degree."> Anonymous nods.> "Cadance, are the spice farms still running?"> You perk up."They should be. There may even be some of the Tenders still out there."> "We'll go over there. Those are much, much more open."> There are, as you had predicted, a few ponies still moving through the fields - their muzzles encircled by the white masks that protected them from the pungent odor of the plants that grew there.> Anonymous slips from his cart, walking to the edge of the field and reaching down to drag one of the roots from the ground.> "Wasabi. Pure, real wasabi - 140 dollars per kilogram produced. Nearly nine-hundred times the value per mass of corn. Eighty-five percent of farms growing it fail in a year; ninety-three percent by two years. It's fantastically hard to grow. Cadance, how many ponies work this field?"> Dredging the figures from your memories, you pause."The Wasabi? No more than forty-eight, Master. Earth ponies all of them - Crocus runs this field, and she has six assistants with similar talents."> "How many fields have we lost?""Two fields' worth. Out of sixteen. The spring we had that bad frost."> "There you go. Another example - simple talents, put to common use. Those with relevance can lead, the others support. The ones with talents in geology and engineering clear the fields and lay the pipes; those with plants grow the product - and so on."> Murmurs rise from the guests again, nodding as they begin to understand how he works.> "And the best part is, because of the independence I make use of - twenty-six ponies. No guards. You can look around and see yourself; there aren't any men walking around with guns keeping them in line. They work on their own."> There in fact is a guard, at the very far end of the field.